Awesome Wedding March!

This has got to be the best wedding march EVER! What a great way to celebrate a relationship! I heard that it was featured on the Today show.

Class and Prejudice

One of the things that I took for granted growing up was household help. One of the benefits of being middle class in a third world country is that labor is cheap, and for 50 euros a month, a lady, sometimes two, lived with us and took care of the children and the house and the cleaning. Granted, sometimes things get stolen, or the occasional maid runs away with the construction worker next door. However, the benefits outweighed the dangers. We never had to worry about food. The house was always tidy. The kids didn't need daycare, my mother could go to work. There was someone in the house 24/7. We eventually lost the keys to the front door and never bothered to replace them, since, well, there was always somebody in the house. If a maid stole something, or is under suspicion of having stolen something, we fired her. That was that.

Over the years, a family has served us on and off. It started with a woman in 1987, who then referred us to her cousin when she got married...we eventually adopted the daughter of one of these women, she went to college during the day and cleaned and cooked at night. She works at an office now, a job that my mother placed her in. That is called moving up. Two girls from her little barrio now cook and clean for my parents. One of the girls looks after my nephew and nieces.

Reading The White Tiger reminded me of the shock I felt when Thomas pointed out that I treated the help like dirt. I never shouted at them or abused them. But as he pointed out, they were invisible to me, noticed only when I needed something. I mean, I thought I was being kind, I never really gave my treatment of the maids second thought. Leaving the Philippines and coming back made me see things with fresh eyes. By then, I was used to doing the household chores myself, and I felt almost embarrassed when I asked a maid to hand me a spoon, or when she would wordlessly pick up my barely used drinking glass. Almost.

I am aware that things work differently there than they do here in Germany. There are times, times like now when the baby is coming, that I wish that I could hire a yaya to take care of the baby while I go work. But mostly, I am kind of happy that I do my own housework here. I didn't have maids when I moved out of my parents's house when I was 23, but the satisfaction and appreciation of seeing a clean window done by my own hands didn't hit me until I moved here.

It is a very different mentality. Over here, people would call it slave labor. In the Philippines, people think that they are doing a good thing by giving somebody a job. In a country with high unemployment and population, these two things coming together provide this economic set-up. In the novel, the boss, Mr. Ashok, was seen as "softened" by the West. I sometimes think if it was actually a good thing that I began to see the maids as human when I went back in 2008. Thomas said that it isn't such a good idea to treat the maids as equals, since this will never work in a country like the Philippines. A country where class determines whether you can speak English like an American or not speak English at all. This fact spells the difference between staying where you are or moving up in society. It is telling that all of my acquaintances and friends in the Philippines talk like me and dress like me, while the rest of the world equates Filipina= domestic helper. Isn't it enough that they eat the same food as you do and have their own room and own fan and own toilet, he said?

I still don't know the answer to that.

Living in Conscious Faith

Coming from a Catholic country, I have always took Catholicism for granted. I went to Catholic schools and went to a Catholic university. I studied the Bible and Salvation History in school. My family is also Catholic, but they weren't strict about it. I grew up with a Catholicism that recognized that the Church and the humans who serve in it are not perfect. I participated in a lot of Church activities. I worked in a Catholic magazine and worked for the press office of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines.

I did, and do, a lot of things that many people who criticize Christians as "hypocritical." I believe in contraception, I don't think that pre-martial sex is bad. Reading the Old Testament convinced me of that (Read about Lot's daughters). I believe that women should be priests and that although I would never do it myself, women should have the right to get an abortion. The Church making a big hoo-ha about people having free will to choose sin over good is a principle I think the clergy should put into practice. Homosexuality? Yes, the Bible says it is immoral. But I think that the story of David, God's favored, and Jonathan has been swept under the rug. Really, the homosexual subtext in that story just blows my mind. If you tell me to get my mind out of the gutter, please re-read that story.

I was Catholic because everybody was Catholic. I went to Church, but I did my own thing on the weekdays. I still do. I took it for granted.

Moving to East Germany, living with atheists, and having an atheist for a husband was for me a puzzle, at it was a revelation. One doesn't need religion to be an upright person. All religions can get along, as long as there is mutual respect and understanding. It hurts me sometimes when atheists challenge me to tell them what makes us better than them, because I don't think like that. I don't think that I am better than them. I just have found my personal truth, a belief that I believe in. It is not something that I have to, nor want to defend, because it is something that every person should discover for themselves.

Living in Germany made me think long and hard about being a Christian. Why am I a Christian? Do I want to be a Christian? Can I believe and worship my God in another religion (say, Universal, Wiccan or Lutheran)? Do I want to stay Catholic, despite the Church's flaws?


I spent a week in Taize in France, trying to answer those questions. It is a village an hour north of Lyon in the French countryside, an ecumenical retreat area run by the celibate Taize brothers. I ate prison food, spent three times a day in Church, and went to Bible study with a great bunch of people, from different countries and different Christian faiths. We talked about the Bible, argued about what Jesus's word really meant to us, and how they relate to us in the present day. We had a great moderator, Brother Jean-Marie. I was surprised to learn that there are a lot of Protestants are more dogmatic than Catholics about certain rules, like divorce.

Being there was like being in a Christian paradise, where everybody got along, and had civilized discussions about our differences. We discovered that we were more similar than we were different. As for my questions, I realized that I want to remain Christian. I will leave the Catholic question as it is right now. I will remain Catholic, but I will not, as I have not, closed myself from attending services from other Christian religions. I discovered that the thing that turns me off the most is when a Church damns people from other faiths, even if they are also Christian. I find that choosing to be Christian is really more liberating than just being one. I hope that people will respect this decision just as I respect their decision to believe in what they believe in.

I Now Pronounce You Mr. and Mrs. D.

We were not sure how to do the name thing when we got hitched. I kept my name, he kept his. But then he decided to take on my name. His reasons: I have a cooler name that is unrelated to hooves. Foreigners could not pronounce his name, and Germans could never spell it correctly, either. That's why he was so impressed that I got his name right three weeks after our first date.

As of yesterday, Thomas H. is Thomas D. Yes, it's official. We have the papers and everything.

Changing your calling cards and e-mails must be a bitch. Poor fella.